A Dangerous Son (2018) - Review
Originally published May 2018The last couple of HBO documentaries I watched were both interesting and informative. So, I figured I'd check out the latest one that popped up on HBO Go's homepage just a couple of days ago. A Dangerous Son manages to be yet another interesting documentary from HBO that provides some intriguing perspectives on one of the worst situations that parents can ever find themselves in: having a child with a mental illness. As the title suggests, it focuses on boys with mental illnesses and how those types of kids can end up being a danger to themselves or others. It's all very interesting, but...
A Dangerous Son is not the most informative documentary. It's a perspective piece, meant to give you the viewpoints of various parents dealing with the violent and irrational tendencies of their sons, as well as provide some subversive messaging buried underneath. As a result, it focuses a lot more on the emotions and experiences of the people involved rather than focusing on statistics or the types of brain disorders these young boys have. There's still something to be learned by watching A Dangerous Son, but don't go in thinking that the documentary will compromise its agenda for the sake of educating the viewer.
Image: HBO
Pros
The perspectives of the parents of varying economic and racial backgrounds provide a wider array of viewpoints than one sometimes gets in a documentary
Testimonials point out the various prejudices that the public often forgets it has toward parents of problematic children
The statistics that are provided still point out the atrociously porous nature of the US mental health system
Cons
Too focused on trying to make you feel something instead of educating
Would have been nice to have gotten more father perspectives on problematic sons
The one father perspective that is there is somewhat glossed over
No call to action for this issue; messaging is not helpful
Additional Thoughts
It's difficult to judge the severity of these situations as a spectator of a movie that covers multiple stories over the course of two hours. It's also difficult to do so when my knowledge of psychology is limited to what I learned in college and what I read in the occasional internet article written by a real psychologist. I'm also not a parent. On top of all that, one of the primary messages of this movie is that, unless you have a son with extreme mental disabilities, you probably shouldn't judge. But this is a movie review, and judge I shall.
Image: HBO
A Dangerous Son is organized in a couple of different ways. It follows the lives of three different single mothers raising their problematic boys. It is also broken up by some testimonials from other mothers, as well as some interjections from the occasional psychologist, or from Virginia senator Creigh Deeds, who had his own personal trials with his son. The single moms are the primary focus of the documentary and we only experience the interviews and testimonials on an occasional basis, usually to further prove a point. The senator is the only one in the documentary who provides any sort of fatherly perspective on the experience. Thus, it's a shame that not more time is spent with Senator Deeds, as his perspective might have offered a bit more to the story about how fathers handle unstable sons and what might have happened in his situation that caused his son to act out.
Nonetheless, the mother's perspective is still a harsh one as these poor moms have to put up with all sorts of crap from their boys. The specifics about these moms are never completely spelled out, but I more or less knew the following from watching: one is a low-income, Jewish mom in Washington; one is a low-income, widowed, black mom in Los Angeles; and one is a divorced, white, middle-class mom in Colorado. Each of them has a son with varying degrees of mental instability, with the one from Colorado having the most outwardly dramatic cocktail of mental diseases, which included autism and mild schizophrenia. Over the course of this movie, we see the two boys from Washington and Colorado misbehave and act out in aggressive and violent ways and learn of the transgressions of the young boy from L.A. after the fact. It's all very effective at drawing you into their stories and evoking sympathy.
Image: HBO
My main issue with A Dangerous Son is that it mimics the very problem I have with how the boys are handled: there's a lot of emotion and not a lot of action. Again, I'm not a parent, and I'm not in their situation, so what do I know? However, my sympathy wanes when I see a 10-year-old punk punching crap out of his mom and very little being done to discipline him. The documentary spends two hours telling us how bad things are for these families. Yet, by the end, I didn't learn much as a viewer, the "solution" for the kids was to send them away, and there was no real call to action for the public about trying to improve the state of our mental health situation in the U.S. It briefly mentions how our mental health care institutions fell apart, but nothing is offered as a solution to help repair any of it. A Dangerous Son gives insight into a mother's perspective in these scenarios but very little about a father's, or how a father, who is active in the boy's life, might improve their behavior. There are boyfriends and ex-husbands who appear to have a role in the lives of the primary boys, but they are barely featured, if at all, so I wonder if they refused to be interviewed, or if they didn't fit the story the filmmakers were going for.
So, with all that said, let's deep dive for a moment and try to figure out what the point of this movie is. The main purpose is to get emotion out of its viewers, which doesn't work so well on me because I ripped out my own heart years ago. Beyond that, however, the messages are murky. If I wanted to make a more controversial viewpoint, I'd say there are a lot of messages in this movie that essentially say: you shouldn't judge the parents for being able to care for their son, because they should have just given him up to the State to begin with. Not to be all "conspiracy theorist", but A Dangerous Son almost seems like a subversive government advertisement for single moms to give up their troublesome sons to government care facilities, because, even though they may feel terrible about giving up their child to the government, the State can do a better job of dealing with the boys' issues than the parents. Obviously, I don't agree with the message, but I'm not allowed to judge, according to the movie.
Image: HBO
There are a lot of mental rabbit holes I could go down with the various subjects this movie skirts or subtly hints at (whether it realizes it or not) that could lead to some controversial statements and viewpoints, so I'll save it. Regardless of what political biases you or I may harbor, A Dangerous Son is still very good psychological birth control—watching these boys act up kept reminding me of The Babadook. I do not doubt that the boys featured in this movie needed more help than their mothers could provide. I do not doubt that the system in which their mothers were enrolling them to help them is full of holes and bureaucratic red tape, as is clearly demonstrated at multiple points in the film. I also do not doubt that the sons discussed in various interviews and testimonials needed help as well. I just don't quite buy everything this movie is selling.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
A Dangerous Son is a competent documentary that managed to captivate me and keep me engaged. Too engaged, perhaps, as I started to read between the lines for messages that may or may not have actually been there. You could blame my conspiracy theorist side, or you could just blame the fact that A Dangerous Son does not provide much useful information to its viewers, so I had to look for something. I was looking for action or solutions to a growing problem in the U.S. and all I found was hidden propaganda that may not have actually been there. Regardless of what this movie is actually trying to do, it's still a good watch, just not an informative one.
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